Co-owners: let more than one person work on an entry as its owner

[ascorbic]

Problem

EmDash decides who can work on an entry from the user's role and the entry's author. Authors can edit, publish, and delete entries they are the author of. Editors and Admins can do the same for any entry. There is no way to give a second person owner access to one entry without changing their role for the whole site.

Entries often have more than one person working on them. A co-writer, a sub-editor, or a fact-checker may need to work on a particular entry without gaining access to everything else. Currently there is no way to give anyone except the author access to just one specific entry.

Bylines don't cover this. A byline is a public credit, and crediting someone gives them no access. This makes sense, because a byline shouldn't be tied to access.

This is complementary to #3717

Use case

This affects any site where several people share work on individual entries: a publication with co-written stories and sub-editors, a marketing team where a copywriter and a product owner both work on a launch page, or a documentation site where two engineers maintain a guide. In each case the site wants to give access per entry, without promoting anyone.

The fix I have in mind is a co-owners field in the entry's Ownership section, next to the author. An Editor adds one or more users. Each co-owner can then do with that entry whatever their role allows for their own content. An Author added as a co-owner can edit and publish the entry. A Contributor can edit the draft but not publish it. A Subscriber added as a co-owner gains nothing, because Subscribers cannot edit their own content either.

Current workarounds

• Make them the author. An entry has one author, so this removes the original author's access. Only Editors can change the author.
• Give them the Editor role. They can then edit every entry in every collection and manage taxonomies, menus, bylines, widgets, and sections.
• Leave them out, and have the author or an Editor copy their changes in.

Your involvement

• I am requesting this capability.
• I am offering to champion the design in a feature plan or RFC.
• I am offering to implement it after the design is accepted.

[MA2153]

This makes sense, but I am confused about this paragraph:

The fix I have in mind is a co-owners field in the entry's Ownership section, next to the author. An Editor adds one or more users. Each co-owner can then do with that entry whatever their role allows for their own content. An Author added as a co-owner can edit and publish the entry. A Contributor can edit the draft but not publish it. A Subscriber added as a co-owner gains nothing, because Subscribers cannot edit their own content either.

Does that mean it is going to be tied to their permissions in the site? Or is that a different system in the document itself? The latter makes more sense to me.

[MA2153]

I am thinking about an author adding another author but they don't want them to be able to publish. Or a subscriber asked for help on a specific piece where they could edit but not publish.

[ascorbic]

This identifies them as an owner of the entry, but it's the user's role that determines what access this gives them. So somebody who is a Contributor is able to edit drafts of entries they own, but they can't publish them. That still applies if they're added as a co-owner.

[MA2153]

Ok, I think that's reasonable for the initial feature, though I expect there would be demand in the future for something more fine-grained.